Karen's Profile

Fantastic read! I believe these fintech companies are the wave of the future and have completely disrupted the banking industry. It is refreshing to hear about a company that is using fintech to help public governments fund necessary and beneficial projects for their constituents. I think open innovation would be beneficial for neighborly in idea generation, but I wonder how effective an open forum would be for securing investor financing. It seems that one of the largest hurdles they face is attracting investors to their platform. Well written article!

Interesting read! I am fascinated by the technological advances in 3D printing and the ability to completely transform the medical field. I agree with your suggestion to take the company private to raise capital. The technology they are creating is unbelievable and being subjected to market pressure may hurt the completion of the drug in a realistic time frame – which would be very disappointing.

Great Article! I enjoyed learning about the tradeoffs of open and closed innovation. My main concern with closed innovation is the ability of companies (like Facebook) having too much control and like you mentioned “offering suboptimal service.” I believe every company should be providing the most optimal service for their customer and competition is key to this. Closed innovation allows companies to be complacent in their ways and stop innovating on new and interesting products/services.

Fantastic Article! In response to your questions I believe that Adidas should reserve their technology for the most premium products. Given the current upfront costs associated with using this technology I don’t think Adidas will make a return on their investment without charging a premium for their products. In addition, these custom shoes are targeted to a certain consumer who is willing to pay for customization and wants the product to remain exclusive. I worry that Adidas might alienate their core customer if they use this technology for their everyday shoes.

Great Article! As someone who is loves music but very bad at remembering artists and song names I find Spotify extremely helpful. Spotify has helped me discover artists that I would have never found on my own and has recommend more artists that I enjoy than not. In response to your open question I think it is critical for Spotify to retain the largest customer base to make their recommendation algorithm better than competitors. The model is only as good as the data it collects and if customers are not listening to songs on the Spotify platform then the model will not be able to make beneficial recommendations. One way it can continue to attract customers to their platform is to have exclusive contracts with artists – guaranteeing content will only be found on Spotify.

In addition to many of the comments above, I too am a fitness device wearing individual (albeit Apple watch and not Fitbit). Given my love for running and active workouts, I am extremely intrigued about the next level FitBit and other companies can take this technology. I too find it extremely valuable to have a watch tell me that if I take x number of steps in a day or increase my heart rate for y minutes per day then I will not get a certain disease. Obviously, the risk is that an individual might be predisposed to the disease and it doesn’t matter how much he or she works out. Machine learning can only help so much – I don’t know how a company will be able to account for an individual’s predisposition to a certain disease. Nonetheless, I find it extremely valuable that a piece of wearable technology can provide me with a preventative treatment plan and can monitor my progress on that plan.